Sport Analytics and Visualization Research Group

Month: May 2018

It has been hypothesized that younger players may shoot threes better when their team is winning [1]. To see if this is true at the NBA level, I analyzed every shot of every game from the 2004-05 to the 2015-16 seasons. I found no statistical difference when shooting threes while losing or winning. I found the same to be true of free throws, but I did find a difference (p=0.037) when shooting twos. Interestingly, when the team is losing, the average player shoots 46.28%, but when winning the average goes down to 45.78%. However, the effect size is d=0.03, which is small.

Here is a density map of the three-point shots, along with the analysis: